RubyConf Day 1 - Sidechannels

Oct 15th, 2005

RubyConf is going super! (This was as far as I got yesterday :-/). The sessions have been a lot of fun, with this first day being largely focused on Ruby internals and Ruby libraries. We’ve had a talk on testing, a talk on a Ruby library (open-uri, very cool), a brave guy talking about Java (it would be a tough crowd, except he’s making a way to run Ruby and still call it Java), Koichi SASADA hamming it up and hurting our heads with VM stuff, and an update on that wonderfully recursive Ruby projects, MetaRuby.

But what I really want to note is the best part of this conference – the hallway. Everybody talks about how great the Ruby community is, and coming to this conference really makes it clear. I’ve had great conversations with lots of people, and even got to sit down next to the legendary Eric Hodel and implement Enumerable for MetaRuby. There are always people sitting around in the lobby hacking, and I’m sure that some cool stuff is going to come out in the coming weeks that had its genesis here at the conference.

So, if you’re here, I hope you’re having a great time, and if you’re cool, I hope we get to talk ;-). If you’re not, and you get to come in the future, be sure not to neglect exploring the side-channel of the conference. It’s a great way to get pumped up and greatly multiply your enjoyment and learning. To put it more bluntly: don’t be a geek – talk to some people!